Outlander season 4 episode 2 review: The pain of Claire and Rufus
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Upon Claire Fraser’s arrival to River Run with her husband Jamie, she made it clear to Aunt Jocasta (and others) that she was not found of the region’s practice of slavery — and understandably so. It was horrific, and it led to mistreatment, violence, and deaths. When Jocasta announced that she would be leaving River Run to her nephew, Jamie privately made it clear that if he were to run this place, his first order of business would be trying to free her slaves. This is when some other atrocities were made clear. Once you had slaves within this society, setting them free sets yourself up, in turn, for bankruptcy. You have to prove they committed a grand act akin to saving a life and, beyond that, you have to pay a hefty amount of money. The system had set it up to where there was almost no meaningful way to make real change, no matter how much Jamie wanted to.
The challenge that Outlander faced in this episode is how to make Jocasta an interesting, nuanced character, even though she also owned slaves. She may have been a more benevolent slave owner than most, but a slave owner is still a slave owner. It took her time to even process the idea that Claire was against this practice, let alone her own nephew. When they made it clear that they did not want to be slave owners, she at least allowed them to do some research into it.
Yet, we do not think that Jamie is ever going to be fully in charge of River Run, rendering this whole plot moot in the first place. After all, the main crisis at the center of this episode was one involving a slave named Rufus, one who was left on a hook to die. He had cut off a white man’s ear, which in this era was a crime punishable by death. Claire and Jamie sought to intervene in what happened, which led eventually to Claire bringing Rufus indoors to operate on him. In the process of doing this, the Frasers broke a rule among the local white land owners that could doom their entire future: They did not follow the rules of the land, which mean that Rufus should be hanged for his offense. She wanted to help, but in turn, her actions ended up potentially hurting him. That’s why eventually, slave owners from all over the region went to River Run with their torches and proclamations to cause destruction, unless the slave was brought back.
What did Jamie and Claire learn tonight?
Mostly that sometimes, rules cannot be changed in a short period of time. Regardless of what they wanted for Rufus, they cannot bring about change on their own. The best thing that they could do was to have Claire poison him, mostly to put him out of his misery before the slave owners could hang him and make him suffer. Had they relented, River Run could have been destroyed and these slaves could’ve ended up in even worse hands. They would have also put their own lives in jeopardy.
For the sake of helping the other slaves, he had to die — it was painful and uncomfortable, but it was the only way. What Jamie and Claire figured out through this is that they want NO PART of North Carolina and its terrible rules regarding slave ownership. They do not want people as property, and with that, they are now all of a sudden intent on finding their own path towards finding a home. This is the foundation for Fraser’s Ridge, and it is going to be quite nice to see the two of them finally arrive at a spot they can claim as their own free from all of this suffering.
CarterMatt Verdict
Outlander season 4 episode 2 was difficult to watch, but not because of the quality of writing. It was more about subject matter that made us uncomfortable (as it should!). Slavery is a difficult issue to tackle since it is an idea that is inherently wrong; how do you show degrees of nuance within it? Just because Jocasta is a better slave owner than others doesn’t negate what she does. Jamie and Claire were the heroes and the liberators, but all they uncovered tonight was that there was nothing they could do to help these people. Claire, on some level, may realize that there’s no way for her to disrupt history here. If she does, the results could be catastrophic and who knows if things would go about the same way in the future?
This was an episode full of lessons about this era and about America’s dark history. We do wish we had even more stories via some of the slaves (especially Ulysses, whose situation is a little more complicated), but perhaps that would have made some of this an even more painful process to endure. There was some comedy in the episode (mostly in the form of Rollo getting introduced to a skunk), but it’s quite hard to focus on it amidst the horrors elsewhere.
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